“... Ginsberg ever proved to be. There were, for example, the soon-to-be-distinguished poet and scholar John Hollander, the critic Steven Marcus, and Jason Epstein, destined to become a force in New York publishing. None of these was to figure in his career with the importance of Lionel Trilling. The two first met when, in his senior year, Podhoretz enrolled in ...”

“... The Waste Land. The second epitaph to Sweeney Agonistes, published in 1926, is a quotation from St John of the Cross: ‘Thus the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union until it has divested itself of the love of created beings.’ This conviction is reaffirmed not only in the poetry up to and through Four Quartets, but in his letters to friends like ...”

“... spectacular ways of showing what their product could do. At an exhibition in San Antonio in 1876, John Gates (then just an agent for the manufacturers, later an iron magnate in his own right) sealed off part of the town’s central plaza with barbed-wire fencing and packed it with dozens of fierce-looking longhorn steers. When the animals charged the ...”

“... and the peek-a-boo portrait of himself! How cunning of Harvard to market the Arcades as another John Grisham or The Jewel in the Crown.) I do not recommend my reading tactic to others. This is a book for moving about in, lightly and irresponsibly and, above all, fast. Benjamin seems to have dreamed of a final, rapid-fire, cinematic delivery, accelerating to ...”

“... Pervez Musharraf. The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department – with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid – fearful that if it did not push this through both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both ...”

“... the cinematography or the design.It was the beginning of the off-network TV tsunami that John Landgraf, the head of FX, calls peak TV. By 2022, he estimates that there were 559 scripted original shows on American television. HBO followed The Sopranos with Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Entourage, True Blood, Boardwalk ...”

“... model galleon sat on a table. Photos of him meeting foreign dignitaries were framed on the wall: John McCain, Vladimir Putin, Jens Stoltenberg.Đukanović stared at me intently during our conversation; a fat watch slid up and down his left wrist as he spoke. ‘Serbia always thought of us as the annoying little rock in their shoe,’ he said, explaining that ...”

“... it’s been really easy to spot some Russians. But offline, it’s not like in the John le Carré books, when you see the handlers, and you really understand the mind games behind it and so on. We more or less know nothing. I feel like the Romanian state knows something, but we have a historical lack of transparency that doesn’t allow them to ...”

“... in the county were killed for want of fodder. By the end of winter in this period, according to John Higgs’s The Land (1964), every blade of grass had been eaten and the animals were forced to follow the plough looking for upturned roots.The social structure of the country had changed, the population had grown, the plough had been improved, the threshing ...”

“... betting shop in Tufnell Park. Two things​ happened to change this. The first was the decision of John Major’s government to introduce a national lottery in 1994. At a stroke it became impossible for the government to maintain its position that gambling should not be stimulated by advertising, since it was now determined to advertise its own product. The ...”

“... imagination Carter may perform, she always comes to rest in the right ideological position,’ John Bayley wrote in a notoriously slighting 1992 review: the ballet idea works well, but otherwise he’s a bit tin-eared. A ‘moral pornographer’, Carter called herself sometimes; she could also have called herself an ideological choreographer. It’s not ...”

“... Framing the matter like this isn’t to accept as proven the ‘impossibility theorem’ of John Bellamy Foster, according to which there can be no ecologically sound capitalism. Nor is it to take it for granted that the next mode of production (and pollution) will necessarily be greener than that of the Soviet bloc, where the USSR drained away the Aral ...”

“... conventional eminences of the Centre, there is a pregnant contrast. The work of just one theorist, John Rawls, has probably accumulated more scholarly commentary than that of all four put together. Yet this veritable academic industry has had virtually no impact on the world of Western politics. The reticence of its subject, who has never risked his reputation ...”

“... Carlo Ginzburg became famous as a historian for extraordinary discoveries about popular belief, and what was taken by its persecutors to be witchcraft, in the early modern period. The Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, each a case-study from the north-east corner of Italy, were followed by a synthesis of Eurasian sweep in Ecstasies. The work that has appeared since is no less challenging, but there has been a significant alteration of its forms, and many of its themes ...”

“... failure in her personal life. I don’t view her personal life as a failure. Unlike her biographer John Peter Nettl, I don’t see the years after her break-up with Jogiches as the ‘lost years’. Nor do I consider that, as Adrienne Rich suggests, Luxemburg’s life is evidence that a woman’s ‘central relationship can be to her work, even as lovers come ...”